Since March 2020, the Center for Business History has been conducting the project "Business and Corona," aimed at documenting how the Corona crisis affects Swedish business. The documentation is based on three parts: surveys, interviews, and media compilation, and will later be made available for research. The ambition is for the documentation to be used by researchers from a variety of disciplines, perspectives, and questions about the impact of the Corona crisis on Swedish business.
Thematically, the project documents five issues:
1. How companies' business has been affected.
2. How companies have reorganized their organization.
3. How permanent the changes brought about by the crisis are expected to be.
4. How societal support has functioned and been received.
5. How media coverage has appeared and changed.
Here is an account of what we have done so far in the different parts of the project.
Surveys
During the spring and autumn of 2020, five surveys were sent out and each answered by about one hundred Swedish companies. Additional surveys will be sent out during spring 2021. Through the surveys, the project's five thematic issues are documented at several different times during the course of the crisis with quantitative data. The free-text responses in the surveys also allow for deepening and qualitative interpretation of the companies' perceptions during several different phases of the crisis.
Interviews
During autumn 2020, 25 interviews were conducted with representatives of Swedish companies and business sector organizations. An additional 25 interviews will take place during spring 2021. The interviews are based on the thematic questions but also allow the interviewees to develop and deepen their answers and thoughts about the Corona crisis. Prior to many of the interviews, we have summarized the affected company’s/actor’s statements and impact of the Corona pandemic in memo form. These memos will be archived and made available along with the interviews.
Would you like to participate in our corona documentation? Read more here
Media Compilation
The media compilation covers a large selection of the daily media coverage about business and the Corona crisis from January 16, 2020, and onwards. The compilation is updated daily and will later be themed in the project.
The documentation of the Corona crisis's consequences for business has, at the time of writing (February 2021), been ongoing for almost a year – but it is not finished. It is important to cover all phases of the ongoing crisis, and therefore we intend to continue the documentation work as long as the Corona crisis continues. Meanwhile, we summarize parts of our preliminary observations and expect to finally present the project results in the form of a seminar and a report. Hopefully, the material collected by the project will be valuable material for future research.
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The documentation project "Business and Corona" is conducted by the Center for Business History's research secretariat.
